Alice Roberts

You can somehow get access to what is perceived to be a better school by either being religious or appearing to be religious. That is unfair.

I have family connections with Salisbury through my godmother. Her sister lived there, so I have very fond memories of visiting the city as a child.

The environment would be better off and everyone would be healthier if we stopped eating meat.

The paleo diet is utter nonsense - it is such pseudoscience.

Biological anthropology tends to focus on skeletons because that's what is often left behind in the ground, but I am a whole-body anatomist, I'm a clinical anatomist and that's what I teach, I teach it all, not just the skeleton, the muscles and nerves, blood vessels.

Then the BBC approached me in 2005 and asked me to be one of the presenters of the series 'Coast', which turned into a very long-running series.

So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.

Archaeology can be overlooked as a discipline, I think, but it's incredibly important to have this other way of approaching the past - not just through historical documents, but through actual physical remains - objects, buildings and the layout of our towns.

The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.

I usually turn over when ads appear on television. But - very rarely - I am gripped by a particularly beautiful one, and wonder if art historians of the future will point to these televisual delights as our best art.

I love Roger Deakin's writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, 'Waterlog'.

More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.

If we don't concentrate on resurrecting science, we're not going to be able to compete in a global economy.

I suppose the thing I'm quite pleased about is that I am, I would hope, a role model for girls and younger women who are thinking about doing science.

In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.

Choosing my career was always based on job satisfaction rather than financial security. I wanted to get a job in science; I enjoyed being a surgeon and I now enjoy being an academic and having a media career.

I was extremely lucky as I was in one of the last generations of British students who went to university and had my fees paid, and I had a grant as well. I also earned money from my waitressing and designing and selling my own range of dinosaur cards.

We need to get across the excitement and creativity of science. That it isn't just a list of facts that have already been discovered - but a process, a creative project, that you are generating ideas, testing them and looking for evidence.

One of the big factors in me going to an independent school was the bullying at junior school. But it wasn't an easy choice for my parents. And now, I do have issues with independent schools.

We have been talking about public engagement for a decade. For me it is about recognising that the mission of science has to be embedded within our culture - the direction in which science is going has to be determined by all of us, and so we need a dialogue with the public.